It's a funny old world, I think, as I extract my finger from the backside of a handsome gentleman lying prone on a podium in a basement in Piccadilly. The gentleman, I ought quickly to add, is an interactive plaster-cast, and his bottom has been designed to allow the wandering digits of all and sundry to locate his prostate gland. If the elusive spot is properly probed, Plaster Guy releases an excitable 'That's it!', in the manner of someone yelling 'House!' at the bingo. Beside him, a similarly accommodating female lies splayed, ready for visitors to ferret out her G-spot, to which she responds with a breathy 'Yeees!'

'We British have long been considered rather prudish,' comments the guide at my side. 'But we're not as reserved as you might think.'

Well, yeees, you could say that. This is all part of Amora, 'the world's first love, sex and relationships visitor attraction', which opened in central London three months ago. The 'academy', brainchild of an investment banker Johan Rizki, took three years to develop with the help of a team of sex therapists, relationship counsellors, doctors and academics.

The result is part titillation, part education, all delivered in the soft pinks and vulvic purples of the boudoir. Visitors can stroll through the 'Amorgasm' exhibit - a multi-sensory tunnel of love designed to show what happens to the brain and body during orgasm, complete with a heartbeat audio track and a video of real people's faces captured at the point of climax (a visual treat with all the appeal of watching your parents go at it hammer and tongs).

In among the touch screens, graphics, aphrodisiacs, avatars and food games, I soon come across the Fukuoko Glove (five different massages!) and a cone that boasts 3000rpm for clitoral and perineal stimulation. I'm about to utter a quick 'ooh missus' when my attention is seized by an interactive screen disclosing how to effect the 'Italian Chandelier' sexual position, which will apparently burn up to 912 calories per hour. If you're inspired by all this, there is of course a shop selling 'Omibod' vibrators (powered by your iPod), pulsating rubber ducks for the bath and those darling little glass dildos which you could easily keep on the mantelpiece without unduly troubling your cleaner.

Amora aims to respond to what its founders claim is a wider liberalisation of sexual culture in this country. The exhibition's up-front, tell-all investigation of the anatomy of sex dovetails neatly with what they perceive to be a changed attitude to our bodies and what we do with them. Last year, 75,000 people visited the Erotica exhibition in London, 'the world's largest lifestyle show for adults', with its comprehensive inventory of bondage tape, crystal nipple covers, discipline equipment, Venetian masks, swinging holidays and adult 'fun swings' to hang over the bed. Where once many middle-class middle Englanders might have blushed or balked at the thought of sauce, sodomy and the lash, there now appears to be an eagerness to explore. In the process, naughtiness has emerged from under the duvet; it has switched on the light, taken a good look at itself in the mirror and thought, 'Well, why the hell not?'

Even wicked old porn has undergone something of a rehabilitation. Though Amora refused funding from the porn industry, it appears that plenty of women flirt with dirt when left to their own devices, chiefly because the internet allows unlimited private access without the stigma of pointing out a title on the top shelf to your local newsagent. Indeed, some of my best friends have impressive collections of pornography - one of them keeps it all in a pretty Cath Kidston box; another makes her own explicit videos with a very compliant husband; a third - a professional woman of 58 - has just had a piercing in the downstairs department and swears that it's 'utterly life-changing'.

Women are also entering the 'pornosphere' in ever-greater numbers. Two years ago a study for MSNBC and Elle magazine found that 53 per cent of American women had 'viewed online adult content'; 41 per cent had viewed or downloaded erotic films.

There has been a rise, too, in adult films specifically designed for and marketed to women - Porn Lite, if you like. This is precisely the kind of content you'll find at Taboo, possibly the UK's most agreeable adult shop, which happens to be in my home town of Brighton. Taboo looks and feels like the changing rooms of a Dolce and Gabbana boutique, complete with cool music, velvet soft furnishings and the kind of leather corsetry you often find on D&G's catwalk.

Like many women, I wouldn't dream of entering one of those blacked-out, red-light joints in Soho. But Taboo, and other high-end X-rated shops like it that are springing up across the country, is different. It positively welcomes the passing punter, perhaps as she is en route to M&S Simply Food, caressing her to a point where buying a set of whirring love balls is an entirely acceptable thing to do before picking up a prawn sandwich for lunch. There's even a pleasant returns policy for DVDs, and an assistant on hand to help pick out appropriate films for the kind of customer who'd quite like to watch something vanilla but isn't really up for the fudge sauce.

In for a penny, I slip up the road to Nua, a darling little boutique that looks from a distance as if it might sell sequined slippers and Moroccan tea glasses. It doesn't; Nua sells 'top-quality energetic and sexy lifestyle products for ladies', which loosely translates as pink leather harnesses, 'cumfy' cuffs and elegant beaded probers (if you don't know, reader, don't ask).

Over by the door, a man I recognise slightly (my accountant? the postman?) is weighing up the relative merits of two silicone butt plugs, one hot pink, one acid orange, while the dazzling woman in charge gives him a very comprehensive but wholly jolly lesson in their use. They talk about sizes and whether to leave them on show ('they're very pretty, aren't they?'), before she hands him a leaflet about the exhibition of erotic art which will take place in the shop next week. There'll be Pinot Grigio and nibbles, and 10 per cent off all merchandise.

A bit along from Nua, next door to an organic winery, is the She Said Erotic Boutique, home to a glorious confection of ostrich feathers and marabou, silken brassieres and cheeky pants. The shop assistants have minuscule waists, red lips and short, cute fringes, one part Dita von Teese to two parts Betty Boop. Downstairs, it's down to business, with an array of feminine 'play products' - including a rather captivating kit for fun lovers to make a life-size chocolate cast (dark, milk or white) of their favourite penis. Really, cosy little places like this simply didn't exist a few years ago.

The remarkable thing is that it has all happened with such speed. In Shere Hite's celebrated sex survey of 1976, only one per cent of respondents said they had ever used a vibrator; in 2006, Ann Summers sold 2.5 million vibrators, including 900,000 Rampant Rabbits.

'Vibrators are so normalised,' writes Marged Richards on handbag.com, 'that you can buy them with your shampoo.' It was only in the Nineties, don't forget, that the ladette emerged, drinking and shagging like a bloke. Today, she's less ladette, more sexpert. As psychologist Dr Petra Boynton puts it on her website, 'At the start of that decade, Cosmo ran an anti-porn survey. By the end of the Nineties it was instructing readers on how to make their own porn film.'

Some shift - and one that Amora is attempting to tap. Amora, with its smoothies, its beanbags and its art, is very definitely a girl thing. The place speaks to a generation of women nurtured on Sex and the City , women who think nothing of a frank discussion about yoni massage over muffins and lattes at Starbucks.

Dr Sarah Brewer, a GP and Amora's director of exhibits, believes that it 'probably wouldn't have worked five years ago. Women today are much more likely to talk about their use of pornography - it's almost dinner-party chat. There's been this explosion of sex-oriented mainstream TV programmes, then there's the success of explicit magazines which cater expressly for women, and, generally, a great deal more willingness to discuss sexuality openly - look at the acceptance of civil partnerships, for instance.'

Look, too, at the new vogue for female erotic fiction. This summer, to indulge a growing demand, Ann Summers and Ebury Press will publish four collections of steamy stories, as told to sexual virtuoso Madame B. 'Sales of magazines versus books in this area have shown that women are much more likely to read erotic fiction than look at erotic pictures,' says Ebury. 'We realised that there was room for more books in this growing, strong market.'

'Women,' agrees Brewer, 'are aroused differently; we're more cerebral, less visual. There's been a rise of what you might call Mills & Boon for grown-ups.'

For a more regular dose of the hot flushes, there's Scarlet magazine, whose remit is to provide a voice for 'today's new female sexual libertine'. Scarlet, says its editor Sarah Hedley, caters to female sexuality in the same way that men's magazines have been looking after the boys for years. In 'Cliterature' - our steamy erotic fiction section - we delve deeply into men and women's sexual fantasies, while promoting a safer-sex message ...' It's raunchy, yes. But, like Amora, it's sensible too. It's porn boots with an insole. Madame Whiplash in Marigolds.

Back at the She Said erotic boutique, though the cuffs and crops are beyond me, I am rather taken with a corset. Not just any old corset, mind, but a superbly burlesque golden-satin number with black lace trim and eight wicked suspender straps. It is called the 'Moulin Rouge', costs pounds 170, and once I've been chivvied into it by my own personal Dita von Boop, there I am: all bosom, all curvy, all 22in of waist.

After years of huffing and puffing about the perils and perfidy of pouring oneself into a contraption as ludicrous as a corset, here is my Damascene conversion. OK, I might not be quite ready for the Fukuoka Glove, I whisper to my hourglass reflection in the mirror, but my inner libertine is thrilled. I do believe I caught her saying 'Yeees!'